Aadhaar, or identity authentication based on biometrics, will lead to good governance, the empowerment of marginalised, and economic prosperity for the nation. It is a scheme in the best interests of the poor. This was the self-congratulatory belief of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) when it conceptualised the idea, and also that of the National Democratic Alliance when Aadhaar was legislated. When the Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of Aadhaar, it said that Aadhaar served a “much larger public interest” and added that it gave dignity to marginalised sections of society and thus the interests outweighed concerns about data collection.
“Aadhaar, on the face of it, is voluntary because no one can be coerced into the scheme. But even after the September verdict, which ruled that private entities cannot ask for Aadhaar and said that no deserving person can be denied government benefit for not having an Aadhaar number, it is still not optional if one seeks benefits linked with the Consolidated Fund of India.
Going by the experience so far, the poor have no reason to believe that mere possession of an Aadhaar number automatically ensures any entitlements or guarantees a decent livelihood or dignity. On the other hand, scores of examples collated from beneficiaries of welfare schemes showed that Aadhaar, far from empowering the poor, often turned into an impediment and a tool of harassment. A day after the judgment was pronounced, a report documenting the death of Chunni Devi, a 75-year-old woman in Rajsamand, Rajasthan, said she died of starvation when her husband’s biometrics did not match at the ration shop for a continuous five days. The incident was documented by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) among scores of other examples of exclusions from entitlements.
The idea that Aadhaar is empowering and bestows a unique identity to an individual, upheld by the Supreme Court, was relentlessly pushed by the present government and its predecessor.
Conceptualised and conceived during the second UPA regime, Aadhaar was given the legal stamp by the present government. The Preamble of the Aadhaar Bill spoke of good governance, efficient, transparent and targeted delivery of subsidies, benefits and services, expenditure for which was incurred under the Consolidated Fund of India. However, each recipient of the number had to authenticate it each time as a precondition for getting the benefits. Despite stated assurances that failure of authentication would not lead to denial of benefits, in practice, people faced denials.
Aadhaar no guarantee of entitlement
Aditi Dewedi was with the Satark Nagrik Sangathan, a non-governmental organisation working in resettlement colonies in Delhi. She said: “In Delhi, we found for the presswallah s who ironed clothes using an iron press with coal as the base fuel, biometrics would not work as the point of sale machine could not authenticate their fingerprints because their fingers were coal-stained and discoloured. Secondly, the beneficiaries who have cards have to link their Aadhaar numbers with their bank account to get pension.” Aditi was among the organisers of the Pension Parishad, a mass meeting of unorganised sector workers and peasants who had converged in Delhi in the last week of September demanding a minimum pension of Rs.3,000 from the government. A resident in the resettlement colony of Jagdamba Camp in Delhi, daily-wage earner Kapoori Devi, said that her son had his ration card cancelled because he did not have Aadhaar and even had his ration card cancelled. “What is the point of having an Aadhaar number or a ration card? The ration shop owner does not open the shop for days together. He says, ‘ dukaan khulegi to aana ’ [come when the shop is open],” she said.
The CEO of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) had said, while arguing for the merits of Aadhaar, that authentication failures did not mean denial or exclusion of subsidies, benefits or services as the requesting entities were obliged under the law to provide for exception-handling mechanism. But like Chunni Devi, Kesi Devi of Panta Ki Anti village in Deogarh Tehsil, Rajsamand, was denied ration repeatedly as she was told her biometrics did not match. MKSS surveyors found that she had received ration only once in the entire year. There were many like her in the village. Gatu Devi, a single woman with a goat as her only possession, lives in a thatched dwelling without a door. In the last one year, she received entitlements only twice as her finger-/thumbprints did not match. There is Ganga Devi, a widow with a BPL (below poverty line) card, who could not avail herself of benefits under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) after the point of sale machine was installed because her biometrics did not match. She was put in the “abeyance list”, which meant that she could not get the benefit until she could provide an explanation at the Sub-Divisional Magistrate’s (SDM) office about why she did not draw her ration in the intervening time. She is also required to write an application to the SDM to bypass biometric authentication. Clearly, having an Aadhaar card has not ensured that the material benefit will reach the intended beneficiary. Neither has it empowered the beneficiary or bestowed more dignity in any manner. In fact, it has reduced the poor to being passive recipients of a technology that they had to adopt with no guarantee of the material benefit from that technology.
The Supreme Court, while upholding the constitutionality of the Aadhaar Act, said the scheme could not be crucified on the unproven plea of exclusion of some. The failure rate of authentication is mentioned as 0.232 per cent in the order.
The MKSS activist Vineet, who has been documenting various instances of poor people being deprived of entitlements, said that there were multiple ways in which Aadhaar negatively affected the most marginalised; ration, pension and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) are some of the schemes in which this happens. “There is pressure to have pension sent to bank accounts, but the banking infrastructure is not ready in our area to support so many people. Banking correspondents provide services at some places, but they use biometric authentication. If that doesn’t work, you have to be in bank queues. In the NREGS, there is pressure to make Aadhaar-based payments. In 2018-19 alone, as per the NREGA Management Information System, Aadhaar-based payments worth Rs.43 crore were rejected. This means these people worked in NREGS, had to be paid for that work, but didn’t get paid because the transaction failed,” Vineet told Frontline .
In August 2015, a three-judge bench ordered the Central government to widely publicise that the possession and production of an Aadhaar number was not mandatory for citizens to avail themselves of benefits. It also ruled that the UID number would not be used by the government other than in the public distribution system (PDS), and in particular for the purpose of distribution of foodgrains, cooking fuel and for the distribution of LPG. By October, more schemes were added to the list, such as old-age pensions, widow pensions, disability pensions, Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana and the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation.
Narrating stories of exclusion from PDS benefits, Vineet said that there were instances of the beneficiary not being allowed to authenticate his/her credentials at the ration shop; of exclusion owing to biometric authentication failure; of beneficiaries not being able to reach the shop; and of the beneficiary being told that biometric authentication had failed even when it was successful. There were instances of less than the full entitlements being given to the beneficiary with no receipts or incorrect entries or no entries in the ration card. There were instances of benefits being denied to migratory workers. Internet connectivity issues also came in the way of people receiving benefits and required them to make multiple trips to get entitlements. For example, Vineet said that despite there being a ration shop some three kilometres from his village, everyone was required to go uphill for biometric authentication as the shop had problems with signal reception. There were instances of the beneficiary being charged more than government-prescribed rates; no social audit being conducted despite being required under law; and of exclusion owing to dealers having inadequate stock.
The MKSS and its volunteers had been requesting the Rajasthan government to provide a month-wise report in the public domain listing the beneficiaries who tried biometric authentication but were deprived of their entitlement. “We have requested the Secretary of the Food Department multiple times since January 2017. If such a report becomes available, it will show the exclusion list,” he said. A number of beneficiaries were found to have been put on “abeyance”. These were cases of people who had not received any entitlement after the introduction of biometric authentication. “We did a survey and found these reasons: biometrics not working, inability by the card holder to visit the shop because of disability/age, and migratory causes. Then there were duplicate ration cards and ineligible persons registered under the NFSA, including non-existent people. We requested the government several times to figure out who these people were, but not much headway has been made there,” he said. The MKSS requested the government to place in the public domain information about the quality of Internet connectivity at each ration shop, but to no avail.
The justification for having a biometric identification appears to consist in the need to grant an identity. The majority judgement of Justice A.K. Sikri stated: “Aadhaar gives identity to those persons who otherwise may not have such identity. In that sense, it recognises them as residents of this nation and in that form gives them their dignity.” The connection between identity and dignity was not very well established either by the respondents or even in the judicial pronouncements. There is a difference between the provisioning of concrete material means such as food, water, employment and shelter to lead a dignified existence and reducing dignity to the mere ownership of a number. In the course of the arguments, the Central government admitted that the leakage of foodgrains through ghost cards was not more than 16.67 per cent. The Economic Survey 2016 stated that authentication failures were as high as 49 per cent in Jharkhand and 37 per cent in Rajasthan. Biometric technology did not guarantee 100 per cent accuracy, it was averred in the course of the arguments by the petitioners. The basis of entitlement should be economic and social status and not a numbered identity, the petitioners said. They contended that the government had not shown any evidence that leakages would not exist in an Aadhaar regime. On the contrary there were data to show that people were excluded despite having Aadhaar. Most interestingly, the government while responding to the failures in the authentication system argued that “as Aadhaar was an ongoing project, there may be some glitches in its working and there was a continuous attempt to make improvements in order to ensure that it becomes foolproof over a period of time”. The only problem was that people would have to go hungry or be deprived of basic survival entitlements until such glitches got resolved. The progenitors and propagandists of biometric authentication failed to realise that “over a period of time” was actually a life-and-death situation for most of the intended beneficiaries.
The judgment held that “certain categories of people, especially those living in abject poverty and those who are illiterate will not be in a position to get other modes of identity like PAN card or passport, etc.” Hence, it said, it was necessary for them to have a biometric identification. This view betrays a sense of deep distrust directed at the poor, who, apart from their routine hardships, are now required to prove their citizenship and economic status in order to get a meagre subsistence-level entitlement. It has not been established anywhere that possessing an Aadhaar card has lifted people out of poverty. In 2015, the Central government issued an order to transfer cash subsidies to bank accounts so that beneficiaries could get their entitlements from anywhere in the country. But the precondition was that the beneficiaries needed to have their Aadhaar numbers seeded with their accounts. Pilot schemes in at least three Union Territories were launched.
The policy of exclusion began in the early 1990s when the then Congress government introduced the revamped PDS followed by the targeted PDS in 1997, which ensured that a large segment of the population got automatically excluded in one stroke. The passage of the NFSA made food security a mandated right to an extent for the majority in the targeted PDS category, but the stress on digitisation of identities for basic entitlements made the implementation of the NFSA ineffective even for the targeted categories. Aadhaar legitimised exclusion. The consequences of the “glitches” were not small, as Chunni Devi’s case demonstrated.
If the aim of the Aadhaar Act is to ensure that the benefit actually reaches the populace for whom it is meant, it is not being fulfilled.
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